Thursday's pensions strike is a return to the bad old 1970s

SUDDENLY it all seems like old times.

On Thursday one million teachers, firefighters, civil servants and council workers are expected to join a strike over their pay and pensions.

Britain has shown its best side as it staged the world's greatest tennis championship and as crowds thronged the roads to welcome the Tour de France. Now it is about to show its worst with a big politically motivated strike.

Yes, many ordinary working people have suffered from static incomes over the past seven years as pay negotiations have been necessarily tough in order to close a record deficit. So how come the unions have all decided to take action on the same day, if not to launch a co-ordinated attack on the coalition?

Everyone is free to argue about the merits of the Government's economic policy but if the unions are going to mount a mass protest against it they ought at least to give us an idea of how they would prefer the economy to be run.

If they want fat pay rises for their own members can they please tell us what other areas of government expenditure they would like to see cut, which taxes they would like to see raised or, if they think the Government should borrow more money, how they would sustain the deficit without the country going bust?

THEY cannot tell us any of these things, of course, because they have no coherent economic policy. All they are doing is standing up for their own naked self interest. They are living in an Alice in Wonderland economy where workers can be paid whatever they like, with no regard to the fact that wages have to be earned.

Yet somehow they expect the rest of us - most of whom have also had to live on static and in many cases falling incomes over the past few years - to sympathise.

The picture unions try to paint of underpaid public sector workers exploited by their employers is laughably untrue. In March the Office of National Statistics said public sector workers are paid between 2.2 per cent and 3.1 per cent more than private sector workers doing similar jobs.

Among the lowest-paid five per cent of workers the gap was far wider, with public sector workers earning a whopping 13 per cent more than private sector workers - as well as enjoying greater job security and more generous pensions.

In other words, the public sector unions are calling on the rest of us to subsidise their members' pay and pensions packets to an even greater extent than we already do. It is hardly a position that is going to win them popular support - without even taking into account the anger that will be generated by a mass strike.

While the teachers enjoy a day off - I received a note last Thursday, even before the unions had held a strike ballot, saying my daughter's school will be closed this Thursday - other hardworking people will be forced to make expensive childcare arrangements, or will lose freelance work as a result of having unexpectedly to look after their children at the last moment.

Ed Miliband should scorn these union leaders

No one should blame all teachers for Thursday's strike, of course. Many are not union members while others will have voted against the strike. They, like the rest of us, are victims of union leaders stuck in the same self-destructive mindset which brought the country to its knees during the winter of discontent 35 years ago.

We all know what happened then: the biggest losers were the unions themselves as public revulsion at their bullying tactics led quickly to falling membership and new laws that put an end to the demagoguery of the union barons.

It is hard to imagine now - at least for anyone under 50 - that back in the 1970s millions of British workers were forced to join trade unions under the rules of the closed shop. No union membership meant no job. There were no ballots before a strike. These unwilling union members were treated as if they supported their leaders and forced to subsidise their leaders' political activities.

When British workers were no longer forced to join unions membership collapsed, from 13 million to seven million. Unions were forced to try to reinvent themselves as more modern, professional and responsible organisations. It is a transition, however, which they have failed to complete.

The union movement is very different now from what it was in 1979, with the largest unions now representing white collar workers rather than shipbuilders and coal-miners. Yet the tactics of their leaders are stuck down the pit in the heyday of Arthur Scargill.

EVEN the man whom the unions planted as Labour leader can see that mass strikes are counterproductive: they mess around the public and in doing so turn the public against unions.

The tone of Ed Miliband's leadership was fixed a few hours after he won the job. In his maiden conference speech as leader he told his party members he wouldn't support mass strikes.

Len McCluskey was seen mouthing "rubbish!" It is typical of the bone headedness of union leaders that having just succeeded in making their candidate the Labour leader they should immediately start to undermine him.

Ed Miliband should scorn the union leaders who have called these strikes and stand up for the ordinary workers who will suffer from it.

If he doesn't it should be pretty clear to him what will happen to the Labour party: it will be rejected, along with bolshie trade unionism, by a public which has had enough of being treated as pawns in politically motivated strikes.